1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to use of computer resources and, more particularly, capacity optimization and planning in an on-demand computing environment.
2. Background Description
In the business of on-demand computing (or utility computing), a customer pays for what they use and the service provider is free to resell unused capacity to other customers. The resource required to handle a customer's workload is typically determined by the peak demand whereas the actual workload can fluctuate dramatically over time. A corollary to on-demand computing is that a customer with low average resource utilization would expect to save money by paying for what they use as opposed to the dedicated alternative and at the same time have the opportunity to access a pool of greater computing power for dealing with occasional surges of utilization.
The concept of creating diversified portfolios to mitigate investment risks is an age-old one in the financial industry (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,292,787 B1). However, the prior art in the computer service industry focuses entirely on the determination of a proper set of servers to handle a single workload. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,270 entitled “Method and System for Determining the Performance Characteristics of a Computer System” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,571,283 B1 entitled “Method for Server Farm Configuration Optimization” describe some methods that determine the minimum amount of processor, memory, and storage required to satisfy an expected performance (e.g., target processing time, downtime, etc.) from a set of workload parameters.
What is needed is a system and method for determining not only the best set of servers to handle a single workload, but also an optimal grouping of multiple workloads and the best set of servers to handle them.